We were honored to get the opportunity to be interviewed by BBC Tech Life, but even more delighted to share the amazing work NPO Shout It Now are doing with the help of Simul8.

Have a listen to our interview with BBC Tech Life’s Alasdair Keane here!

•  A 44% increase in clients being tested for HIV
• A 27% increase in at-risk clients being initiated onto PrEP (the HIV prevention pill)
• A 30% increase in the number of gender-based violence victims they were able to support

Shout It Now has also reduced waiting times, maximizing the time that the team are able to spend one-on-one with clients, and improved working conditions for staff thanks to its simulation project with Simul8.

Our very first project with Shout it Now was an ambitious one, where we designed new processes that would enable them to double the number of clients being treated with no additional resource. It was our first pro bono project, highlighting the importance of simulation in driving process improvements for not-for-profit organizations. This powerful partnership inspired us to launch our “Tech for Good” program, which focuses on using our expertise to make a positive impact in the world.

Hearing from Buhle, a Quality Assurance officer at Shout It Now, on the positive impact of the current project, not only on clients but the well-being of staff at Shout It Now, really put everything into perspective. Buhle and her team now have time to stop for lunch breaks, which has greatly improved the mental health of staff as they have the time to care for themselves, meaning they are able to provide an even higher standard of care to communities. This is why we do what we do, and we are so happy our technology is being used in such a life-changing way”

Read on for the transcript version of our BBC Tech Life interview!

‘HIV has a huge impact on communities in South Africa. One charity is turning to simulation technology to try to help more people living with the condition. Tech Life’s Alasdair Keane has been finding out more.

I’m just swiping through the social accounts of Shout It Now. They’re an organisation in South Africa providing free sexual health information and treatment. And they use these platforms to share what they describe as a non-judgmental message to young people. William Taylor from the charity told me why. 

We’ve got basically about one in five people who live with HIV. And what we also find is that young women, which is our target group, we really focus on the young girls between 15 and 24 because they’re at higher risk. And what you’ll find is the women in that age group are seven times more likely to be HIV infected than young men. Shout It Now empower people to have real conversations around sex and relationships.

I’ve jumped on a call with William and some of his colleagues to hear about the organisation’s mobile clinics, big buses that visit different communities.

I’m Buhle, a registered nurse by profession, but I am working as a quality assurance officer. Our team  work in the field, the ones who go into the communities to do HIV testing and HIV prevention and also offer contraceptives, as well as gender-based violence support.

So talk me through what a kind of day, or maybe even an hour, a day is probably a long time but if we were on the bus right now what would we see be happening?

Okay, so if you were to walk into our bus, the first thing that you’d see, you’d probably see some of our staff outside in their bright and colourful uniforms. And then you’d definitely see our bus. Honestly, it’s not hard to miss. So literally when you walk in, it’s sort of a clinic that has cubicles inside it. And then there’s people that are going to do HIV testing.

But with such high rates of HIV in South Africa, demand for services is high. That’s why they’ve turned to software made by a company more than 8,000 miles away in Glasgow in Scotland to make key decisions and expand their work.

Welcome to Simul8. I’m here to meet Laura Reid, the CEO and Andrew Wylie from the company. To explain what simulation is.

Imagine the complex process involved in carrying out a medical operation or the sub-assembly of an electric car.  It’s really a web of interconnected parts. It’s really, really very complex. It were even a small change at one point, kind of unpredictable consequences throughout the entire system. And that’s where simulation comes in. It’s a bit like having a time machine. You can speed up time, you can even slow it down if you want to. And what you can do is you can experiment with different scenarios in a completely risk-free environment because you’re not doing it in real life.

So we’re looking at a laptop. We’ve got the mouse, we’ve got the keyboard and on the screen is a visual representation of effectively a bus. Talk me through what that is.

So essentially in the background there is a model where we’ve got all the pathways, all the ways in which clients will come into the service, which nurses they will go to see, which service they will use. And so there’s lots of big coloured buttons that say instructions and settings and you can change all sorts of different parameters.

Yes. So as I say, the scenarios we can change, which is the data going into the system, we can change things like how many healthcare advisors we’ve got, how many nurses we’ve got, how many social workers we’ve got, SOS staff. And then from a physical perspective, how many cubicles are on the bus, how many nurse cubicles have we got as well? 

When you run simulation and it starts to play through, is it playing through a day in the life of the bus? Is it a week? Is it a year?

 In this case we’re running for a week, but we can run years at a time.

And then you can see the impact of adding in extra buses, extra staff, that’s what.

Essentially, so we can obviously test like an operational sim day to day, week to week, or if we’re making kind of large strategic changes, we could see the impact over years, even decades in the matter of seconds.

For William Taylor and Shout It Now, they’re already seeing the benefit of running these scenarios.

We realise one of the biggest bottlenecks is with our nurses. So, we increase that in each bus track, we have two nurses now. And we used to have where we’d have clients walk away because they were waiting too long, where now we don’t, we have a lot less of that. And you know, we’re getting a lot of more people actually referring because they’ve seen that’s working so well. But I’ll ask Buhle maybe to tell you what it’s done for the staff.

With our staff previously, we actually used to have a challenge where especially if it was one or two nurses in the mobile, still there wouldn’t be enough time to actually go for lunch. We all know how critical lunch is and how we all you know, get grumpy and moody once we’re hungry. But lately our staff are actually also happy because even for their mental health, they’re coping much better. Because now they’re able to have enough time for almost everything. So there’s enough time for lunch, there’s enough time for you as a person to face a client one on one and deal with that client. There’s enough time, like literally there’s just enough time allocation for almost everything with our staff. 

Simulation tech is getting more and more advanced and increasingly is playing a behind the scenes role in many aspects of our lives, whether that’s for organisations like Shout It Now and Health Care to products we buy.’